Frequent Miler on the Air - How to book round the world awards | Ep158 | 7-9-22

Episode Date: July 9, 2022

Want to travel all around the world in business class for about as many points as most people use for a simple round trip to Europe? This show has the tips you need to book the famed ANA Round the World award -- and reasons why you might want to consider paying a few more miles and booking your trip via Air Canada Aeroplan instead. 1:25 Giant Mailbag: About those Virgin Atlantic awards . . . https://frequentmiler.com/virgin-atlantic-opens-award-space-gates-enhances-air-france-mile-value/ 3:45 3 Cards, 3 Continents, 3 Updates https://frequentmiler.com/frequent-milers-2022-team-challenge-3-cards-3-continents/ 5:45 What crazy thing...did Marriott Bonvoy do this week? https://frequentmiler.com/bonvoyed-again-what-marriott-gives-it-can-take-away/ 8:41 Awards we booked this week 14:45 Main Event: How to book round the world awards 15:27 ANA Round the World https://frequentmiler.com/tips-for-booking-anas-round-the-world-award/ 40:40 Using Air Canada Aeroplan to achieve similar goals 53:25 How do you handle an early morning arrival at London (or in general)? Join our email list: https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ Music credit: Annie Yoder

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did Citi do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event. Frequent Liler on the air starts now. Today's main event, how to book round the world awards. So if it sounds good to you to fly around the world in business class, we're going to be talking about details, how to really make that happen and for a very low number of points.

Kind of exciting, right? I'm excited. I like the idea of traveling all around the world. So yeah, absolutely. I'm in. Yeah. Now it's totally on my mind because I've talked before about how we're doing this three card, three continent challenge where we each, me, Nick and Steven, each have a budget of three credit card sign up bonuses to use to build as amazing of a trip as possible. And I've stated publicly that my intent is to book a ANA Round the World Award. And so I've been working on that and I've been learning a lot throughout the process. So I have a lot to say about how to book these things and we'll get into that. Instead of giant mailbag segment today, we have a little oops to report. Last week, we reported how Virgin Atlantic had opened the floodgates on their award availability. And that's true. And we reported that Air France is usually the best way. Air France miles are usually the best way to book Virgin Atlantic award flights.

That's true. But we also suggested that Air France had full access to Virgin Atlantic's expanded award space. Not so true. It seemed true when I had done the research. Yeah, big whoops. It seemed true when I had done the research for the post that I wrote before we did the recording. But everything I looked for that I was surprised to find, like summer business class award availability from the US to London was just as available on Air France's website as Virgin Atlantic's. I don't know whether I just got incredibly lucky or that they actually changed the rules right after I did those award searches. But one way or another, it became clear to me very quickly. Well, first, a bunch of people wrote in saying, what are you talking about? They're not available to Air France.

And then I finally got a chance to check myself again and they were absolutely right. There's a lot more award availability on Virgin Atlantic's website than on Air France's for flying Virgin Atlantic. So sorry to anyone who got stuck in that. As a small gesture of our goodwill, though, I posted how to get around Air France's annoying forever hourglass. So if you are stuck searching for awards on Air France's website and you want to change your award search criteria, go to our blog and you'll see how to do that without getting stuck in the forever hourglass, which is super annoying. So, all right, with that behind us, let's move on to the next segment,

which is... Which is what crazy thing. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I tried to jump ahead. You're right. Excuse me. Three cards, three continents, three updates.

So this week's updates. First of all, you have an update from Steven, right? Yeah, minor update. So Stephen has told me that he has the shell of his trip booked, has just a tiny bit left to go. And the trip length is nine days. So we now know at least one of our travels is going to start and end in a total of nine days. So that's something new.

That is. That's something new. And to add to that, I can say that I have no update except for the fact that last week I talked about how I had to make a change to an award and I've been on vacation and did not find the time to make that change. So I still have not made a change to my award though. I believe I still have one free change to make. So I think I'm still in good shape. I just need to make sure that I get it right in one shot. Very good. And then my update is that I have on hold my second round the world award trip. So I let the first hold lapse because I had put it on hold a couple of weeks ago. Not really intending it to be final, but I wanted to find out what ANA was going to charge in taxes and fees and whether some of my assumptions about how round the world

bookings worked, whether they were true. And so I proved those out and I have the second one on hold. I'm also going to let this one lapse, at least partially. I'm hoping to call in tomorrow and get it changed rather than start all over. So we'll see how that goes. But I learned some things in the process, which we're going to talk about a little later in the show. And, but first, but first, what crazy thing did Marriott Bonvoy do this week? Oh, Marriott, you're back. What did Marriott Bonvoy do this week? You know, last week they listened to our segment about how Sweet Night Awards are worthless. And they decided, you know what, we're going to give everybody hope for a minute. We're going to extend these Sweet Night Awards because, of course, the Sweet Night Awards were extended through the end of 2022. Very generous of Marriott to extend those awards again, even though they were due to expire. And of course, Marriott had been saying that they wouldn't extend again, wouldn't extend again. And so lots of people were excited when they woke up and they found, oh, wow, I still have these Sweet Night Awards that I can use through the end of the year. But Marriott was very prompt to dash all hopes there and reach out to blogs and say, hey, uh-uh, guys, we know that these got extended,

but we can't extend them again. So we're going to make sure we take those back away from everybody who got an unscheduled and unexpected extension and an unintended extension from Marriott. Clearly, they did not want to extend those again. In fact, they said they couldn't extend them again, which seems slightly misleading since they already had extended them again. But they don't want to extend them again. So, yeah. Why not? I mean, why wouldn't you just extend those again? I mean, we talked last week about how you can never really use them. I don't get it. Why not? I mean, why wouldn't you just extend those again? Right. I mean, we had talked last week about how you can never really use. I don't get it. Why? Why bother? Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, it can't possibly cost them anything significant. The I guess I mean, they maybe they must give the hotel some money when when they're used. But but yeah, there must be so few that are successfully used that I can't see Marriott actually paying much or caring. Right.

And why would they want to just hurt what little customer service goodwill they have left, if any? They accidentally built more goodwill and they were like, no, no, no, hang on, guys. No, never mind that. We're taking that back. Right. Right. Don't get excited. That's right. So these days, these days, the only really good customer service you could expect from Marriott Central is accidental, right? You got to hope that they don't discover it. Exactly. They make a big mistake and they don't figure out that they made a mistake so yeah uh so yeah if you if you saw those extended sorry to be

the bearer of bad news if you didn't log back into your account yet this week but they should be gone by now i think all right well that brings us to our final segment before we start the main event is awards we booked this week. I don't have any news there, but it sounds like Nick does. So what do you have up your sleeve, Nick? I do. Well, so it's not an award I newly booked this week, but it Spa. And I looked at the pictures on the website and I thought it looks okay. It's an SLH property. I really just wanted to visit Lake Como and I wanted to use points. And most of the points hotels on Lake Como are like not really on the lake. And this one is a small luxury hotel of the world that is directly on the lake about halfway up of Lake Como. And so I thought, okay, well, it's right there. So I don't have to drive to get to the lake. I can just walk

across the street to the lake. So yeah, I'll give that a shot. 29,000 points a night when I reserved it versus cash rates for base rooms are like 1200 euros a night or so for this place. Most of the time, or the 12 to 15 or so a night. And let me tell you something. It blew my mind. First of all, if you haven't been to Lake Como before, wow. Talk about worth the hype. My goodness, it was gorgeous. I fell in love with Lake Como and I am definitely going to get back there. So that was for starters, it was amazing because it was literally right across the street from the most incredible views. And then beyond that, it was just an incredibly luxurious property. Now I have gone on the record before to doubt the SLH connection. I did have a good SLH stay last year, but overall, I haven't been so enthusiastic about these smaller boutique

properties. It's not usually my thing. I usually actually prefer the cookie cutter, I don't know, predictability of chain hotels. However, this place made me a believer. Let me tell you something. I have often had the experience using miles and points where I feel like I don't belong here, but it's kind of fun because I use these points to stay at this Grand Hyatt or rather Park Hyatt or some other high-end property that would normally be out of my price range. This was one of the few times in my life I felt like, wow, I really just don't belong here. This is a very fancy place. And it was terrific. I mean, the food was fantastic. The service was over the top. When we went to dinner, I had my kids with me. So it was my wife and my kids and I, and my wife

went to go to the bathroom and I knew that my young son was going to get upset as soon as she walked away from the table because that's the stage he's at. And not only did I know, the staff knew because two of them came over right away as soon as she walked away from the table because that's the stage he's at. And not only did I know, the staff knew because two of them came over right away. As soon as she walked away from the table to start playing with him, pick up one of his toys, pretend it was eating the food. They saw it coming. They saw the meltdown coming and they fixed it before it even happened. And that was just one of those many small things over the course of one day. I spent one night there and I booked another night already and I am hunting for more nights. So if you found more nights by the time this is recorded, I must have already booked my stay because I am looking

for any time in the calendar I can get multiple nights. Because the hard thing is it's like, if you find one night, that's it basically. I haven't found many multiple night stays. So that's the challenge. But if you can book it, highly recommend it. That's one of the downsides, I think, of the SLH properties is not so much that there's anything wrong with them or there's some fantastic properties like you found, but finding award availability can be really difficult. And I suspect that's because, one, a lot of them are smaller properties, like don't have a huge number of rooms. Two, they probably only reserve certain rooms for this purpose.

And it's probably the ones that sell the cheapest. And so they probably sell out the cheapest, the quickest as well. So that's- And I should add something on that. So SLH bookings, as you might know, if you've looked at them through Hyatt before, are guaranteed for two adults. And it says in the terms that if you have more people that it's potentially subject to a charge, basically an upcharge for more people in the room. And anybody who's traveled in Europe before knows that many places only allow a capacity of three people in a room. And so of course I have a family of four now, so that's been a bit of a challenge for me in trying to plan a trip to Europe. So

their rooms only had a listed capacity of three. And so I booked two rooms and because I found availability for two rooms and I said, okay, well, there's two rooms. It's 29,000 points each. It's kind of pricey, but you know what? I'll book both rooms. So I don't have a problem. I really didn't want to end up paying an extra person fee. I figured if the place is 12 or 1500 euros per night, I don't know how much they're going to charge me for an extra person, but it's probably more than I want to pay. So I booked the second room. And of course, when I got there, everybody was like, give two rooms, two rooms, two rooms. They all thought that was so strange. And sure enough, they confirmed that if I had just booked a room for three people and then contacted them and asked for a crib for the baby,

that would have been fine. There would have been no charge for four people in the room. So that was good to know. And that's a situation I've run into now a couple of times on this trip. So it's worth at least reaching out. I should have reached out ahead of time. I could have saved myself 29,000 points. Although as it worked out, it was fine because I ended up having an office. I was working on the post that I was writing anyway. So it gave me a good quiet space to work. So that was good enough. I'm not unhappy that I booked the second room, but good to know because I think there, yeah, like Greg said, there may only be two or three of those base rooms in that property.

Right. Right. All right. That's great. I'm really looking forward to looking into that one myself. Don't know when I'm going to have a chance to do it, but I'm excited for it. I love finding just great places to stay like that. That's awesome. Okay. I think it's time. All right. So that brings us to the main event. It does. How to book round the world awards. So first, let me say, I'm going to get into a lot of detail about specifically using ANA points to book round the world business class awards. And you don't have to take notes while you're listening to this because we have a post called tips for booking ANAs round the world award. And it has everything listed in a nice, easy to digest manner. So look there for details,

but listen to this for, I guess, the higher level, try to get the gist of how to go about doing this. So first of all, if you're thinking, wait a minute, I don't know what ANA is. I don't have any miles from ANA. What are you talking about? How could I possibly do this? You probably do have access to ANA miles. ANA is a Japanese carrier and they are a transfer partner with American Express. So if you have American Express membership rewards points, which you'll have if you've signed up for any of those gigantic Amex platinum offers or Amex gold offers or on and on and on, Amex has been flooding us with great welcome bonuses lately. If you have any points from those things, then you have Amex points and they transfer one-to-one to ANA.

All right. With that being said, let me talk about... You have access to the points. Let me talk about the ANA Round the World Award, what that means. So they have a distance-based award chart for booking Star Alliance Round the World Award. So that means that you can book any Star Alliance carrier. So United, Lufthansa. We'll tell you why later. TAP, Portugal, Turkish.

ANA, EVA, Thai Airways, Brussels Airlines. Yeah, there are so many good airlines. So all of those, Star Alliance is the biggest alliance. And so you have access to all of those airlines as long as they've released award space. And the good news is because the alliance is so big, award space is easier to find on Star Alliance than other alliances. So that's all good. And the reason this is so worth talking about is this distance-based award chart is so, so cheap in miles, especially for business class awards. So the amount you'll pay in miles will depend on how far you fly in nautical miles. So there's two types of miles we're talking about. I'm going to start talking about ANA points instead of miles, just to try to cut the confusion here.

Good, because I was already a little confused. All right. You started talking about nautical. I'm like, wait a second. Are we sailing? What's going on here? I'm not a boat guy. Okay. All right. So again, depending on how many actual miles you fly, the lowest price you might pay is as low as 63,000 ANA points. That's very unrealistic. There's no way to really circle the globe in that short of a distance, but somewhere in the range of 125,000 to 175,000 points is very realistic for most itineraries that you're likely to do. And think about that 125,000 to 170,000, that that's like a good, not, not maybe like mind blowing, but good round trip award price for flying from the U S to Europe and back. And, uh, we're talking about flying all the way

around the world. And if you hit the upper end of that, that's going to include going to maybe Australia or South Africa, places that are really far away from the equator as well. It's pretty much far away from pretty much everything else. And let's be clear here that when we're talking about these, these round the world awards here, so the ANA round the world, it's distance based, but then also it's worth mentioning that you can have up to eight stops. So, you know, when we talk about, it's like about the same price as a round trip to Europe. Yes. But you could visit eight different cities and I'm not talking for 24 hours at a time. We're talking, you could stop in them for weeks or months at a time, potentially long as you book the whole thing, right. And I'm not talking for 24 hours at a time. We're talking, you could stop in them for weeks or months at a time, potentially, as long as you book the whole thing within the parameters. So, I mean, eight different cities around there, you can just keep continuing on

around the world for those prices. So it's really, you're getting multiple trips in one trip with the A&A Around the World Award, and that's what makes it so exciting. Right. Yeah, no, exactly. And you could even do all kinds of tricks with that. So for example, let's say you flew to Europe and you haven't yet figured out how to book your return flight, but you found a good Star Alliance option going back. And you know, you have a trip to Asia or Australia in your future, you could start your round the world trip from Europe, fly to the US, stay in the US at home for as long as you want before your flight out to Asia and Australia and to Africa and then back home as an example. And that would complete your round the world trip.

I'm going to quickly mention some of the rules. So you mentioned you can have up to eight stopovers. You are only allowed to fly in one general direction. Like you can fly eastward around the globe or westward around the globe. you can bounce around a little bit within areas. Like, like you can, um, you don't have to fly only, uh, let's say you're going east around the world and you get into Europe. You can backtrack a little bit. You can, you know, fly from Frankfurt back to let's say Lisbon or something. Um, and then forward onward eastward. Um, that's fine. It's more going from big zones to other big zones. Like you can't go from, if you're going east, you can't go from Asia to Europe and then back

eastward because that would be a significant backtrack. Another key rule is that you have to spend at least 10 days on this journey. So you can't do a super fast round the world trip. And I know this because... Unfortunately for Greg. Yeah. I tried booking one that would have been, I think, eight days and was still, nope, it's not going to work. You can sort of trick it by adding another segment a few days later or a few months later and hope that it's not so big that it puts you into another price band for the overall trip. Okay.

And then you're also allowed a maximum of 12 flight segments and up to four ground transfers. So meaning like sometimes you might not be flying and you might not be using the round the world trip to get you from A to B. You might be taking a train, a boat, some other carrier that you've booked separately. That's a ground segment from ANA's point of view. All right. I'm going to talk about a few tips that I've learned along the way here. One, ANA offers better award availability to their own members. So if you're using, for example, united.com to look for Star Alliance award space, you might be missing out on ANA flights that are actually available to you as an ANA member when you're booking this. So that's important to check

ANA. Preston Pysh, It sure is. Because ANA flies a lot of places, right? Adam Back, MD, They do. They do. They fly all over the place. Almost everything connects in Japan though, which is tricky right now without Japan being totally open to tourists. So you have to make sure you transfer through there as opposed to stopping over. And that can be tricky right now. Hopefully that will change in the near future, but I don't know when. Another tip is that if you have elite status with ANA, you have better award availability than those without elite status. And I know this because I did the status match to ANA Platinum status. What was it, about a month ago that that came out?

I don't know if it's still available. A month or two. I'm going to... Yeah, it's kind of tricky. For the Three Cards, Three Continents challenge, I'm not supposed to use my elite status that I got elsewhere to book things. It's going to be a little unclear whether that's happened or not. So I'm going to try to avoid that, try to make sure that anything I book would be available to a general member.

But it was a good thing to learn. Another tip is that once you book it, there are three things you're allowed to change for free. Okay. You can change the time of your flight. So as long as, so of any given segment, you could change the time, but you have to stay on the same carrier. Like, let's say it's a United flight and United flies either in the morning or evening. You could change from the morning to the evening flight for free. Again, as long as the same award availability is there.

You could change the date of the flight, same rules. It has to be, if it was United, it has to stay United. If it, whatever the actual route was has to stay exactly the same. You can't change the route in any way at all. And the third one is you can move up the class of service to the class of service you booked for the overall round-the-world trip. Meaning, if you booked a business class round-the-world trip and some segments were booked into economy and you later find business class available on those same flights, you can move up to a business class on those flights. That's good to know. That's really good intel. Important information.

It really is. And it really makes a big difference in planning these because as you can imagine, getting all the pieces together all at once to build around the world trip can be really tricky. And you're likely not to find award availability in business class on exactly the day or time you want. Or so you have options. You could book it for now in economy and hope that business class opens up. Or you could book for a different day and hope

that you can move to the day you really want it. So things like that are all possible. And I think it's especially good for if you do that trick I talked about where you can sort of build two trips out of a round the world ticket, right? Like I was talking about returning from Europe and then later flying to Australia, you know, so, uh, if you found, for example, a United award flight to Australia from let's say California, um, near the end of their schedule, you know, you could tech, you could put that into your into your around the world trip. And then later when a date opens up that works better for you, I think you could change it to that for free. So that's a nice feature. All right. Yeah, that's a great feature. So those are two really important things because

oftentimes we see availability change close in, right? So that's a very common thing that we'll see more award space open closer to departure. Now, that hasn't necessarily been true in the summer of 2022, but in general, that's something you can usually count on. So that might make sense, especially on carriers where we know that happens because there are some carriers where you know pretty reliably that X amount of time in advance, you're likely to see this type of seat or that type of seat. So locking in an economy award right now might be a really good idea, particularly if you have date flexibility, because then you don't even necessarily need it to be on the exact date that you've booked a day or two before or after. I feel like in a lot of routes, you'd be pretty likely to find something as you get closer to departure. So yeah, that's a great tip. That's a really good, I like that one. I didn't know that. And that's really good to know. Yeah. Yeah. All right. A couple other tips I have is one is that ANA allows up to a 72-hour hold depending on what airlines are in your round-the-world trip.

So, yeah, this is kind of craziness. What I was told when I put on hold one a few weeks ago, I was told I could have up to 24 hours. And so I was kind of surprised when on my most recent call, I was told 72 hours. And when I asked the agent more about it, she said, well, I have to check the individual airlines because some of them have rules that don't allow holds at all or longer holds. And so if you're told no hold, it might be because of one of the airlines that are in there. And so you might want to ask the agent, well, what if I took out that, you know, I don't know, Ethiopian flight or whatever, would I be able to put on hold longer? So there you go. That's kind of interesting.

That's really interesting. I look forward to reading that. I don't really know how to gain that or whatever i mean it's well but but it's important to know those so i mean i assume you're not going to tell us now because i would give away too many details of your trip but i look forward to finding out like especially if you found out the rules for all the different airlines or at least most of the popular airlines i don't know if there's an easy way to find that out or if they would share that information but that'd be really helpful, right? You know, next time I call them, I think I'll ask them if they know which airlines allow it and which don't. If they know any at all, that would be useful information.

Sure. You're right. Because I mean, having a few days to work out the details, make sure that your dates are firm or that you found the best flights or see if something else opens up. I mean, that could certainly be useful. 72 hours would be nice, especially also keep in mind that mileage transfers to ANA are not instant, right? They take a little bit of time. So a 24-hour hold is a little risky already. 72 hours though, you'd be fine. Exactly. That's a really important point that we didn't mention earlier is that when you transfer from amex to ana ideally you already have the the trip on hold so that because it can take a couple days for the points to appear in your account and if those awards

disappear before then you're you're out of luck. So yes, getting it put on hold before you do the transfer is, is key. All right. Another tip, how the heck to get these people on the phone? I have spent endless hours listening to their autobot telling me, you know, that, that there are long hold times as if I didn't know already because I just spent hours on hold. And it turns out that if you're calling from the US, the easiest thing to do is call at 9 a.m. Eastern time. That's when they start up in the morning, the U.S. call center, which is very good. And they, at least last time I tried, it took only about five to 10 minutes to get someone on the phone by doing it that way. I tried calling first thing in the morning, Japan time and calling the Japanese call center, but that didn't work. So I'm not sure what, you know,

are they hammered with calls there more than the U S one? I don't know. I tried a couple other foreign call centers, no luck at all by doing that. So it seems like, um, at least as far as I could tell, the U S one is, is the good one. If you call at 9am, you call later in the day, God help you. Okay. Um, and that's a real problem because if you find at 9am you call later in the day god help you okay um and that's a real problem because if you find awards you know in the middle of the day i'm not kidding find awards in the middle day this happened to me um they may be gone by the time you get a hold of anyone at ana and so um there's nothing really you can do about that. Uh, yeah. Cause as far as I could tell, you really do have to wait until 9.00 AM. Um, I, I mean like literally I spent like an hour and a

half on the phone and, and the system just hung up on me then after all that time. So I felt like completely powerless. This was when I tried calling in the evening, felt completely powerless to get anything done. And then I was so excited in the morning when someone actually answered. Wow. Yeah. I'm surprised and surprised that calling Japan didn't work out better because I often find that calling foreign call centers works out better. And in most cases, the foreign call centers have people who speak English almost anywhere around the world. And particularly if you choose certain countries where English is a common second language, then I tend to find it better. I almost prefer to call a call center outside of the United States usually. So it's really interesting to know that that didn't work

out in this case. Right. Right. All right. A few other tips. So finding the award availability. I like to use United.com. It's really good at finding Star Alliance awards. You do need to be aware that what it shows of United's own flights is not necessarily going to match what ANA sees. So you have to verify that through ANA's website or through Air Canada's website is another good one to use. But pretty much any other award space it finds, there's a really good chance ANA will be able to see it. As I mentioned earlier though, there might be ANA flights that are available to you as an ANA member that United won't find. So you do need to look through ANA's website and let's talk about that. Wait, hold on, hold on. Let me back you up here because I want to hear that. But I was curious

when you said you prefer to search United. Is there a reason you prefer United over Air Canada before we get into the ANA bit? I'm very curious about, but is there a reason why you prefer United over Eric? Yeah, absolutely. I like United's monthly award calendar. So if I know an exact route I'm doing, what I do is I go to advanced search, say I'm doing an award, say nonstop only. That's key um tell it i'm uh flexible dates boom i can see a whole month at once um and that's that's huge so love that uh air canada it's pretty tricky jumping from you know day to day to see what's going on and and and i find it really uh difficult how we talked about this before how and how air canada shows mixedclass awards that are terrible. So like where it'll show that there's a business class award

that is like you're going about 100 miles in business class and you're going 14,000 miles in coach. And I don't think United shows those, at least as business class awards. I don't remember seeing those. It will show mixed class, but usually they're at least close to 50-50 or so. So anyway, yeah, I think United's much easier to use. It has its quirks, but I've gotten a lot of mileage out of it. But ANA, ANA is not an easy one to use. So you have to use them for two reasons. One,

it's the only way to get an estimate of how much the taxes and fees are going to be. So ANA, if a carrier imposes like fuel surcharges, for example, ANA is going to stick them to you. And that's why I said earlier, don't book Lufthansa because Lufthansa, like, you know, one big segment on Lufthansa is probably in business class, probably going to set you back over a thousand dollars in fees. And it's not going to be obvious until you price the whole thing. And they're not going to tell you, the agent on the phone is not going to tell you that you have to pay thousands of dollars because of that Lufthansa flight.

It'll just be once they price the whole thing. So the way to find out is to go through ANA's website and try to book an award, a simple award. So let's say you're looking at a Lufthansa flight from Newark to Frankfurt, and you want to see how much the fees are on that. Ideally, you'd be able to just look for that one flight and see what it would cost. It's not that easy though. ANA won't price it without you booking a round trip. So you have to book a round trip. So what you could do is separately look for award space in reverse for far in the future. a United flight coming back on that same route that was available in business class,

because then you can, through ANA, book the, or pretend to book the Lufthansa flight outbound and the United flight return. And I'm saying United because they're not going to add fuel surcharges to your award. And then you could look at the taxes and fees, and that would be pretty close to what you'd be paying. Another way you could do it, and this is what I usually do, is I look for a round trip that includes the same carrier in both directions. And then I price it on the ANA website and just divide in half to get a general idea. It's not at all perfect because some airports have different departure taxes than others, but it will certainly give you an idea whether the tax and fees are really high or really low by doing that. So that's what I've been doing.

That's for figuring out the award taxes. There's an easier way to find out award availability. So if you want to find award availability, the problem with doing a round trip award is you have to tell it from the get-go whether you're doing business or economy class. And if it doesn't find exactly what you put, it's going to say no awards were available. Oh, and don't forget, whether you're doing this or the next step, I'm going to tell you, make sure you check the little box to say, I want to look plus or minus three days in either direction because that's a way to try to find stuff as well. If you don't click that box, it's not going to look ahead or behind and it's going to

just tell you nothing's found if there was nothing on that day. But no, the trick is to do a multi-city award. So what you do is you say, all right, Newark to Frankfurt and then Frankfurt to whatever. It doesn't even matter what the second leg is. You just want something where there's likely to be some results at some point. So you do like Frankfurt to Zurich or something that where you think there's enough flights that there's likely to be something. And the nice thing about these doing the multi-city award search is that, as I said, it'll look at both economy, business, and first class and show you the availability all at once. And that's something that the round trip won't give you.

The downside is you can't price it. So unless it's a round trip that you built into this, when you try to price it, it's going to give you an error, say it's not bookable. And so you'll never find out the taxes and fees that way. Ah, okay. I was like, well, so what are we even doing the round trip for? Cause I thought for sure you were going to tell me, and it's going to price each segment individually. And so you'll see exactly what the taxes and fees are going to be. I'm like, why do we just waste the time in the round trip? Okay. So that you can't even see that. So that's just to find a bill. I mean, you could. Right. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I'm pretty sure you could do the round trip through the multi-city thing and then you'd

get it to price, but I don't think you'd get any additional information. Right. So, all right. So those are my tips for actually finding the awards. Very interesting. So there you go. Look to our post also about the tips for booking around the world for tips about which airlines, uh, charge high fuel surcharges and which ones don't. Cause that's really important too. Very good. So that's, those are my tips for booking a and a around the world.

And I think you've got some alternate ideas in mind. Yeah. So, you know, if you can book the a and a around the world, it's think you've got some alternate ideas in mind. Yeah. So, you know, if you can book the A and A around the world, it's a great thing, isn't it? Well, I mean, not exactly the same, but if you can book the A and A around the world, that's a great deal. However, of course you do have that problem where you run into airlines that levy high fuel surcharges. And of course, some of the airlines with the best award availability, Lufthansa, Swiss, they tend to have really high fuel surcharges, or even some of the ones like Turkish have moderate fuel surcharges, and you probably don't want to pay those, right? So you might decide that you'd like to be able to fly on those airlines that have lots of availability and

high fuel surcharges, but you don't want to pay the fuel surcharges. So, okay, let's throw out the idea of the ANA for a second. And let's look at Aeroplan because Aeroplan has a really interesting award chart. And I've been digging into it quite a bit and playing around with it quite a bit because Aeroplan allows really flexible routings. And so you can kind of build yourself a little around the world. Now it's not quite the same as in the old days, there were some other tricks you could do for around the world. It's not quite the same as the old days, but you can book a pretty incredible trip for a reasonable number of miles. It'll cost you a little bit more than it would via ANA to get around the world. But when you add the ability

to fly carriers that would be, I don't know, too expensive to book through ANA, then it might be worth paying a few more miles to not have to worry about that. So to give you a for instance, from the United States to Asia is 105,000 miles one way in business class, which seems like a lot until you consider the fact that you can add a stopover for 5,000 miles more. So you're at 110,000, I think with a stopover to Asia, or maybe that's actually Asia was a hundred. So let me take that back. Asia is a hundred plus five for 105 and Oceania, I believe is 105 plus five for a total of 110 with a stopover. Now, the nice thing with Aeroplan is that they will let you piece together all of their various partners, and they're really flexible on the routing. So for instance,

I have priced out awards with Aeroplan now where I am bouncing back and forth, and they don't seem to care very much unless your stopover point makes the distance ridiculously long. And what I mean by that is the rule is that if you take a straight line, let's say you're booking an award, and I'll correct myself because I'm fairly sure it's 100,000 points from the US to Asia. So let's say you want to fly from New York to Bangkok, just as an example. So that'd be 100,000 one way. You can add a stopover for 5,000 points. Your stopover point cannot make your trip distance longer than twice the distance from New York to Bangkok. So let's just throw out a number. Let's say New York to Bangkok is 10,000 miles in distance flown. Then whatever routing you choose can't make your entire trip more than 20,000 miles flown.

Now, I mean, that's nearly the circumference of the world. That's very generous. Very, very generous. That means you can fly north and south of the equator by quite a distance bouncing around. And because Air Canada will let you string together their various partners, and they have quite a few different partners, it's possible to book long stops in a lot of different cities. Because, of course, in many cases, there are in a short amount of time, then it might be convenient to string together these things and say, okay, well, you know what? I can spend 23 and a half hours here and 23 and a half hours there. And, or maybe 18 hours or 12 hours, get a full day stop and then sleep on the plane on the trip to the next place. So if you're kind of like, I don't know, like a rapid travel chai type of a person, if you're familiar with Stefan who writes that blog, the type of person who wants to just keep on the go, on the go, on the go and see a bunch of places, you could very easily

build one of these trips where you do see six or eight different cities. Now I say six or eight different cities. Let me take that back because the maximum number of segments one way is six. So you can't do more than six segments and you can't more than double the distance from point A to point B in a straight line. So, but again, that gives you a wide degree of latitude. Now, when you also consider the fact that Air Canada, yeah, I mean, and when you also consider the fact that Air Canada is not only part of the Star Alliance, which is the biggest alliance, but they have a ton of other airline partners. They have Gulf Air, they have Oman Air, they have the Air Dolomiti, they have

a whole bunch of Vistara. They've got a whole bunch of different partners that are not even in Star Alliance, Etihad. So it gives you a ton more options. I think you have 41 different airline partners. So you've got a lot of different options to do that. So they can be an option where you say, okay, well, I booked that trip and then I booked one back. And so let's say it costs you about 105, 110,000 miles each way to get from New York to Asia or Oceania and back. So you're talking 200, 220,000 miles with stopovers in both directions and potentially visiting five or six cities in each direction because you get your six segments. So, I mean, you could potentially visit 10 or 12 different cities and have a long stop over in two plus your destination for 220,000 miles, let's say.

So it'll be a little bit more expensive than booking the ANA, but you won't have to worry about any fuel surcharges. Preston Pysh, CFO Alphabet and Google No, no. And wow, there's so many advantages to that besides the overall point costs, as you said. So you're probably going to save a bundle in cash because Air Canada doesn't impose the fuel surcharges. And the transfer, I think the point transfer for most transferable points currencies is instant to Air Canada. So that's huge. So once you find the availability, you could actually be on the phone with them and transfer at that point in time, probably. You certainly can. Yes, you certainly can. Yeah. And there's no

sort of downside to going further. Whereas the ANA one gets more expensive as you go further. It sounds to me like if you figured out a route that maybe went to Australia and Asia, and then your return went through Europe and Africa back to US, something along those lines that you could be spending less than a comparable trip would cost with ANA. You certainly could. So you could be spending fewer miles and obviously less in fuel surcharges and have access to more partners. Now that won't necessarily appeal to you if your goal is to just get from A to B as quickly as possible. But if your goal is to fly different partners, different products, and see different places, then I feel like Aeroplan has a lot of flexibility there. And the other nice thing is that you can very easily piece that together yourself by searching one segment at a time, because you could use United the way that Greg described earlier.

You can use Air Canada to find those different segments. And I ran into one issue where I had a segment where I knew it was available. I saw it available on a whole bunch of different sites. It was available to all the other Star Alliance carriers. And the phone rep told me that they couldn't see it either. And I explained this whole bunch of different sites. It was available to all the other Star Alliance carriers. And the phone rep told me that they couldn't see it either. And I explained this a couple of weeks ago. I said, okay, let's just search that segment separately.

And of course, they did eventually find it and see it. It did take a little bit of pushback to look for it. But the nice thing is that you don't run into that same married segment logic that you'll bang your head against the wall with American sometimes or One World carriers, in that it seems, in my experiences so far, if you can find the individual segment you want available, Aeroplan will also be able to find it available. And so that's nice. The big downside with using the Aeroplan search engine that I found so far, I asked why you preferred United over Aeroplan. And the one thing that really annoys me is that if you're searching any route where there's an Air Canada flight that can help get you there, then you're going to get all sorts of results that are really hard to parse through because they include Air Canada flights and the pricing is so variable. So you don't know that it's a safer award. And it may not be,

at least the segments on Air Canada may not be. The segments on other partners are probably bookable, but you'll see these business class awards available and find that, oh, well, maybe that's not bookable or it's going to cost me more miles than what I would anticipate based on the award chart. Yeah. I don't know off the top of my head how they do that. So what if you do have a segment that's on Air Canada itself that's priced that isn't available to other Starlance carriers, so it's not considered saver level, but maybe it has a good price and you bake it into one of these longer itineraries. So how do they handle that? You know, that's a good question. I didn't actually try that. I assumed that they wouldn't

be available for the same price. Because if you look up, let's say you look up that New York to Bangkok, and they find you an Air Canada flight that gets you across the pond to Europe, and then you connect to Thai Airways somewhere, let's just use that as an example, then they price that award potentially more, whereas that should cost, let's say, 100,000 miles. You may see a price of 150 or 160 or 180,000 miles one way because that Air Canada flight is priced higher. So I don't think that that would work in one of these more complex routings, although I have not tested the boundaries on that. So that's something that maybe I should need to play with a little bit. All right. Yeah. But you know what? Yeah.

You've convinced me. You know what? Just the ability to add like Etihad in there makes such a big difference in what you could build in a trip like that than what you could build with Star Alliance alone, which ANA, going back to ANA for a second, ANA does have other partners besides Star Alliance,

but this Round the World Award is specific to Star Alliance. So you can't add in have other partners besides Star Alliance, but this round the world award is specific to Star Alliance. So you can't add in those other partners. And you can do that with Aeroplanet Air Canada, do it yourself version. You could. You could. Yes, you absolutely can. And the other nice thing about this is I mentioned that some partners have like Lufthansa and Swiss often have a lot of availability, but they come with high fuel surcharges.

But then when you look at it, you say, well, I think Turkish Airlines serves more destinations than any airline in the world. And they've got moderate fuel surcharges. So it's hard to build that in. For Greg, for the trip, I imagine you probably don't have any segments in Turkish because the surcharges are just too high. I mean, I wanted to book a couple of Turkish awards myself that I was like, it's just it's too much money in the surcharges are just too high. I mean, I wanted to book a couple of Turkish awards myself that I was like, ah, it's just, it's too much money in the surcharges. So, but whereas- The reason I'm not going to book what I have on hold right now is because I want to get the fuel surcharges lower. So I'm looking at alternatives and I'm pretty sure it's because of a Turkish. Yeah. And so that's nice with an aeroplane that you can fly these airlines that serve

lots of destinations around the world and not have to worry about the surcharge. You're going to pay whatever the taxes are. I think that's huge. So that is nice. All right. And it's hard, by the way, to price out yourself what the taxes are going to be. You're going to have to call because on these longer itineraries, like I mentioned, I already pieced something together that includes lots of stops in different countries and things. And so I sat there and I added up the taxes. Like if I booked each flight individually, how much would the taxes be? And I figured probably that wouldn't

match what I was told because I'm not staying in some of those places permanently. I'm staying there for less than 24 hours. And sure enough, the taxes were much less than what I anticipated by adding them all. So I don't know of any way to price that out yourself without calling and having somebody manually do it. And you can't just use their multi-city award search tool or do they not have it? Yes, but not if you want to be really complicated. That tool works to some extent, but actually, no, I take that back. You can use the multi-city tool to find availability, but the multi-city tool online will not price something with a stopover or it will price it incorrectly. It'll price it as two separate trips. So if you want to book something

with a stopover, you have to call in order to do it. And so it won't price it accurately online. Gotcha. Okay. All right. All right. So that's Aeroplan. So I think that brings us to the question of the week, right? All right. That's right. This week's question of the week came in from Frequent Miler Insiders. And this is one I liked because I ran into this situation myself just last week. So I'm trying to pull it up here. I took a screenshot to make sure that I wouldn't lose it. Okay. So somebody in Frequent Miler Insiders, Bill says, in a few weeks, my wife and I are scheduled to arrive at Heathrow Terminal 5 at 9, 10 AM on an overnight nonstop flight from Orlando. I'm currently booked three

nights at the Waldorf Hilton, but check-in time is not until 3 PM. I emailed the hotel my request for early check-in, but sadly it's not looking likely. So you copied an email from the hotel saying basically they're not able to guarantee early check in in advance because they have very high occupancy right now. So he asked, are there any suggestions? What should I do? I'm willing to cancel and book somewhere else if I can check in earlier. So do you have any tips? I mean, you know, you've traveled to Europe many times.

You travel to London quite a bit and flights usually land there in the morning. So what do you do? Yeah. Yeah. I don't have a great solution. Lights usually land there in the morning. So what do you do? Yeah, yeah. I don't have a great solution. I mean, there are daytime hotel booking options, but I haven't explored those. What I've generally done is tried to book places where I have access to a lounge. So I go at 10 in the morning, 11 in the morning and check in,

so to speak, but the room's not ready. Um, but they'll take the bags. So, you know, uh, usually they'll deliver those bags to your room once your room is ready. And usually they'll, they'll ask for your phone number and tell you, we'll text you once, uh, your, your room is ready. So I've done everything from, Oh, we're so wiped out. We just sort of go collapse in the lounge to going out doing touristy stuff, getting that first day in and waiting for the phone call or the text message. One time at the Marriott, the St. Pancras in London, they actually gave us a loner room for the time until our suite was ready. So we actually had a room to go take a nap. You can't guarantee that. And certainly not

there either. It was great customer service on their part. But if you're very lucky, that's a great way. What about you? Do you have any tips that I didn't mention? Well, so the first one would be book the night before, uh, you know, to paying for a night that you're not really going to use the room, but if it's really important to you to be able to crash as soon as you get there, that's one option bending and availability. So you book the night before you're going to get there and make sure the hotel knows so that they don't mark you as a no show that you're not flying in until the morning. So make sure that that's out there,

but that's one option. But then day use rates. Yeah. You kind of touched on that. So Hilton.com, you can just put in the same check-in day and check out day, and it will check day use rates for you. It just automatically recognizes that you're looking for a day use rate. So you can do that. And it varies. You have to check the rate details on each hotel as to what the times are on that. Because I saw some hotels in London were 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Some were 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. They were different time periods. So depending on when you're going to arrive, when you want the room, it might matter as to which one you want to book. Now, I had a really hard time with it. I was trying to book specifically, there was a Doubletree by the airport, a Heathrow Doubletree that was coming up 49 pounds for the day use rate. I was like, oh, that's like 60 bucks right now. So that was great to me. I was willing to pay $60 to just go straight to the hotel with the kids and be able to lay them down for a nap if I need to. But it errored out every time I tried to book it. So I wouldn't work online. I didn't have time to call and check because I didn't think to do this in advance. So I don't know if someone would have been able to book it over the phone, but that's one option. Now, when I looked for the same option,

first of all, Hyatt has a similar day use rate, and I can't remember the name of the code. You just have to Google Hyatt day use rate. I think it might be office, but you'll have to look it up. And you can type in the code, and then that will show you day use rates on hyatt.com. And again, you pick the same check-in day. I believe with Hyatt, you pick the check-in, and the checkout has to be the next day. But when you put it in office, it recognizes you're looking for a day use rate, and you'll see that confirmed in the results. IHG, when I went to their site, tried to do a day use rate with IHG, it didn't give me any results, but it told me to go to dayuse.com.

And dayuse.com is a website that somebody mentioned in Frequent Miler Insiders, and that will search tons of different hotels for day use rates, not only chain hotels, but other hotels also. And I found that there were quite a few options in the area around the airport that were not so bad. They weren't cheap in London. Things are expensive. So hotels are expensive even for day use rates, but they were much cheaper than what I expected or much cheaper than booking a full night. The problem, of course, with all that is that you can't book that as an award. So you're going to have to pay the cash rate for whatever that is. I don't know of any program that'll So you're going to have to pay the cash rate for whatever that is. I don't know of any program that'll let you use points for a day use rate.

But those are some options to keep in mind. Now, of course, also at Heathrow Airport, there are a couple of Hyatt places that are like 5,000, 6,000 points a night. I think 6,500 points peak. So it must be 5,000 points, a couple of category ones there. So that's worth looking into because you might just want to book that for the night before you're going to arrive because it's not very many points. It's a decent deal. So those are a couple of options for you.

Hopefully one of those helps you, Bill, or somebody else is planning a trip. You know, one more thing I should mention, I forgot about this, is that a lot of hotels that are more full service have, have like indoor spa slash like swimming pool areas and including the St. Pancras one I mentioned before has that. And what they'll do, they'll let you have access to those areas, assuming all guests have access to it. And, um, so, so you could literally go down there and, um, there are showers you could refresh after the trip. They even have like, you know, razors and shaving cream and stuff in, in the, uh, locker rooms.

And so you get all refreshed. You could, they have nice soft, uh, like chairs around the pool. So you could, you know, hang out there and, uh, enjoy the, enjoy the sort of spa area. It wouldn't include spa services for free, but, uh, you get to enjoy the spa area, including the steam room and things like that, um, until your room's ready. So that's, that's another thing that, that I've done at least once. So there you go. I ran into that problem at the St. Pancras and that's exactly what they offered me the use of the spa area. And because I have titanium status and I had gotten, I'd used a sweet upgrade and that did get confirmed. I did have access to the chambers club. So I was able to go to the club and get breakfast. And we

did kind of all pass out in the chambers club at some point, I think. And luckily nobody kicked us out of there. So, uh, so that's what we ended up doing. It was not ideal though, with two young kids, I would probably do it differently next time. We also walked around for a while. They fell asleep in the strollers, blah, blah, blah. But, uh, but next time I'd probably look for one of those day use rates ahead of time. I think that totally makes sense. I think the equation is totally different with young kids along. Yeah. Yeah, it is. Okay. All right. My friends, I think that brings us to the end of this week's episode. And if you're watching on YouTube, I apologize for the fact that I've been becoming more and more ghostly as time has gone on. I've been recording outdoors because I'm here in Europe, but it is getting dark now. So we're at the end of today's episode. I apologize for the video. If you're watching, if you're listening, though, you wouldn't have known the difference. So thank you very much for being there this week. If you'd like to find out more about what we've been talking about, you want to go to frequent miler.com slash subscribe. so you can join our email list. You can get our posts in your inbox each day or each week. You can follow us on all the various social medias. We're on Instagram, Twitter. We have our Frequent

Miler Insiders Facebook group that I just referenced where you can ask questions and get them answered by lots of other people who are interested in this stuff. And if you have questions or feedback, you can email us at mailbag at frequentmiler.com. Goodbye, everybody.